The Heart of Gaming

Muslims have Mecca. Metalheads have Wacken. Gamers have GamesCom. Yes, it was this time of year again. Gamers from all around the world have flooded the exhibition halls of the Koelnmesse in Cologne for the 11th time now. But not only them but also developers, publishers, cosplayers and so many more that hold gaming dear to their hearts. On an area of 218,000 m² – roughly 30 football fields in size – 373,000 nerds have come together. Me being one of them…

Anime, Cosplay1 and Gaming

This year has been my third year in a row to attend GamesCom and seeing how my favourite games publisher, Activsion Blizzard, did not have a stage or booth I decided to go there rather unprepared. I had no list of things I desperately wanted to see. (I’ll admit, I would have sold my soul in a heartbeat to get to play Cyberpunk but alas, the queue was so quickly filled up every day that I decided it wouldn’t be worth the wait.) So my first day pretty much consisted only of strolling through the exhibition area, admiring some of the work developers have put into their stage presence and was blown away by some of the amazing cosplays – albeit a lot of it from League of Legends. The sheer time energy and dedication people must have put into some of these outfits is stunning. So I sat there in front of the ‘Cosplay stage’ until the cosplay dance off started which was hilarious to watch. But in a good way. Major props to everyone who took part in this event and so gladly embarrassed themselves!

Statue of Sylvana. Character in World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment.

But this was only a really small part of what has been shown. There have been entire halls filled just with merchandise for all sorts of games, mangas, comics and even gaming soundtracks. Another hall was dedicated entirely to indie games where smaller studios or sometimes even one-man-projects showcased their games on a single computer. Ironically enough, I got stuck on Nanotale, the successor to Epistory. A game that is entirely about typing words which will then appear in the game world so you can continue onward on your journey. I guess writing is following me even into my video games. But there has been one thing I low-key had been excited for: the advancement on VR. Seeing how Valve released their latest headset just a few weeks ago with some major improvements on tracking, I was curious about its competition. At the GamesCom in 2017, there was an entire hall dedicated to VR, headsets, games and programs to be showcased to the masses. Queues so long you had to sign up a day before for a mere 5 minutes of playtime. Fast forward to 2019 and you would only find a few indie developers or universities that specialize in game development with some neat little VR features. Walking on a plank with a simulated abyss beneath you, for example. Back then I already got into some heated debates with my fellow gaming friends about whether VR is the future of gaming and I always saw it just as a gimmick but nothing more. I’m a bit sad now that I might have been right but who knows. Maybe it’s just the calm before the storm.

But that’s not what most of the people have been there for. Apart from Cyberpunk by CD Projekt Red, the other major titles represented there have been Monster Hunter: Iceborne – the upcoming expansion to Monster Hunter World – as well as Borderlands 3. Impossible for a regular mortal to get into any of these exhibition booths unless you’d want to wait for 10 hours straight.

Statue of the Elder Dragon “Teostra”. Monster in Monster Hunter by Bandai Namco.

eSports

I had some time to kill on my second day to see some presentations by ‘THQ Nordic’ which I mostly watched because they have fantastic stage presence and really showed their games and interacted with the crowd. So in the meantime, I had dropped by a Super Smash² eSports-tournament by Nintendo. Damn, these people are good. For all the uninitiated: eSports is the term given to tournaments and the scene surrounding sporting events that take place entirely on virtual playgrounds. While still being chuckled about by most people, there are reports within the industry that by 2022 eSports will have grown to the size of the NFL in terms of people following it and money spent on the events by sponsors. The comparison is quite apt in my opinion. There are already tournaments like ‘The International‘ that can be compared to something like the Super Bowl. Back in 2011, the first ‘International’ was being held by Valve for the game DotA 2³ with – for that time – an astounding amount of 1 million dollars in price money. This was groundbreaking news for the scene as for the first time ever such an amount of money was thrown at a tournament and from there on it only continued to grow. In 2019, the price money reached a staggering 34 million dollars. And within the fanbase, it already has reached the status of something like the Super Bowl. A lot of viewers and supporters don’t actually play the game anymore themselves but still are excited as ever for that one week every year to cheer for their team. Yes, I’m talking from experience here.

Statue of Solaire, praising the sun. Character from Dark Souls 1 by From Software.

Gaming and politics

As we are already on the note of America here, I want to tackle a more serious topic. Video games are constantly under fire by mass media after killing sprees. Usually criticized by politicians, Donald Trump has been the most infamous recently to do so after the attacks in El Paso in which 22 innocent people have been killed; several more injured. In a response, Trump gave a speech in which he blamed video games as a reason for domestic terrorism.“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this.”, so Trump in his speech 5th August. I am sick of this nonsensical rhetoric that has been proven wrong so many times now and neither will I let a talking orange with a wig destroy part of my gaming culture. In a country where video games are as easily obtained as real weapons of war, you can not go around spouting these idiotic paroles just to defend the biggest lobby in your country. Lobby-ism is all that Trumps politic has been about for the past years and he shows no different face in this matter.

But let me tell you: It’s not the pixel-guns on a screen that kill people. It’s the actual guns sold in American stores that do. So start policing that shit maybe?

Should I give you an example on how ludicrous this has gotten? After the aforementioned shooting that happened in a Walmart, the chain decided to remove “all signs, displays or videos that depict violence in an internal memo.” This decision led to all video games, consoles and movies above a certain age rating to be removed from the stores while happily continuing to sell guns. (Source: https://www.npr.org/)This whole discussion that is being stirred up by politicians so eagerly has only one purpose: To move attention away from the actual problem. The guns.

Annotations

1: Cosplay = a showcase of an anime, manga or video game character in costume and behaviour. 2: Super Smash = A popular fighting game by Nintendo with playable characters from many different games. Very popular as a casual party game with a massive professional scene behind it for years now. 3: DotA 2 = short for Defence of the Ancients 2. A videogame by Valve Entertainment that belongs to the genre of Mobas in which you take on the role of a character together with your team and try to defeat the base structure of the enemy team.

…and I’m not talking about your exams

With the upcoming summer break and our current topic of ‘Language and Identity’ in mind, I got inspired to read more books. Books that revolve specifically around our main topic in a very varied way, but more on that in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

“The Frighteners – Why we love monsters, ghosts, death & gore“, by Peter Laws, will start my little review series. And while the subtitle already gives away what the book is all about, the cover itself makes its own very direct statement: red gothic skulls, zombie hands and tombstones are thematically arranged around the title. If you’ve read my own article, ‘Torn between two cultures‘, this term, you might have already gathered that the macabre certainly is nothing I would ever back off from. Quite the contrary! I guess this is why a dear friend of mine gifted this book to me a few months back. How right she was in doing so…

I went in completely blind – nope, not even the blurb to what this book wants to tell me – and the more surprised I found myself after the first few pages. I hadn’t heard of Peter Laws before, just like most of you, I will assume, unless you’re an avid reader of “The Fortean Times – The World’s Weirdest News”. If so, you’ll also have probably come across his monthly column about horror movies. I assume that this is what sparked my own interest, and curiosity made me have a look at the blurb after all. This man certainly knows what he’s talking about, right? A quick google search of his other books mentioned tried to shock me with some mysterious and eerie-looking cover art to his novels “Purged” and “Unleashed”. Amazing! Someone that really revels in their fascination for the morbid. What else is there about him? Well, the usual. Apart from the books already mentioned, some podcasts on YouTube, and he’s an ordained reverend. Hold on a second. A man of God writing about the supernatural? I left my pitchfork rest in the closet just a moment longer and see what he really wants to convince me of before I call the Inquisition.

I’m glad I stuck with it. Peter Laws’ narrative style is fantastic. From the start, you’ll feel right there with him on his journey. A journey straight to the land of vampires, but also through time – to explore the development of horror culture – or straight into the depths of the human psyche. He really knows how to keep the reader engaged and how to convey his message, which is researched in great detail, with footnotes for the curious. As a student during exam time, I would usually throw a book with footnotes straight on the pyre with some of the witches Mr. Laws mentions. He introduces it so intuitively, though, that it didn’t bother me in the least. I guess that might be the famous priest rhetoric shining through here.

On the topic of priests: I can already hear all my fellow agnostic and atheist friends’ alarm bells ringing at once. And I’m not going to lie; I expected more preachy-ness after reading Mr. Laws’ biography. But this ‘fear’ is just rooted in more stereotypes that, either through his ingenuity or rhetoric, he manages to subvert completely. Frankly, he’s exactly the kind of person that would make me listen to a sermon once in a while again. That’s not to say that he doesn’t bring up his professional career here or there. But could you blame him as a man of God that is pondering whether God himself is just slowly getting more and more frustrated with having to protect a reverend all day long from all the “horror demons” trying to pull him to the dark side?

Last but not least, my personal favourite chapter was the one that’s inevitably linked to horror culture – death. Not because of a morbid fascination, but because, as he so rightly mentions in his book, too, it’s a topic that is never brought up in society nowadays. What could shed more insight on this taboo than a casual interview between a reverend and an undertaker? The transitions between these funny bed-time stories and the serious ones of two people talking about our (most likely) last moments on this planet happen so seamlessly, yet professionally. And right before you get lost in between the pages, Mr. Laws makes sure to take you right out of it, metaphorically speaking, by putting you on a chair next to him, and to straight up tell you “that he will understand if you want to put away the book for just a few moments to ponder your own life. He will be waiting right here”. I took one of those many moments in the book to do exactly that: put away the book, but instead of reflecting on my own decisions, I decided to start writing what you see on your screen right now.

If you’re curious about what else Peter Laws brought up in “The Frighteners”, make sure to pick it up and try to escape from everyday life. A journey I promise you won’t regret.

A fancy word that’s relatively easy to spell? Masochism. I guess you know what it means. And yet, here you are, ready for a second serving of random facts on language history, politics and orthography. You have (presumably) had a look at, maybe even finished, an article entitled “Playwright, conscience … fish?” in eMAG #34. Amazing details about Korean writing and the evolution of Modern Greek have been revealed to you. What’s next, you ask? More irrelevant facts! And prepare for puns, as well.

Hanoi’ing spelling habits? Thank the
French.

Remember how Koreans had to use Chinese characters before they developed their own alphabet? How, just to write down the most basic things, they were forced to learn the writing system of a completely unrelated language (I know they’re geographically close, but no relation between Korean and the Chinese languages has been proven so far)? Vietnamese speakers, whose language is equally unrelated to Chinese, and whose country is equally close to China, had similar problems. Unlike the Koreans, the Vietnamese had some success in adapting Chinese characters to Vietnamese, to a point where they were illegible even for Chinese speakers. This script, Chữ Nôm, was the first real Vietnamese writing system. It was used for administrative purposes at first, but later on, even poetry would be written in Chữ Nôm. But that doesn’t solve the problem that Chinese characters, a very reduced form of writing, can’t illustrate grammatically important changes within a word.

The most modern
form of Vietnamese writing came from a complete outsider, the Jesuit monk and
missionary Alexandre de Rhodes. De Rhodes, who came from the French-speaking
region of Avignon, created an adapted version of the Latin alphabet that could
reflect the pronunciation of Vietnamese words better than Chinese characters
could. He did take over a few rather inefficient French spelling habits, e.g.
<ph> to express the f-sound, so the system still contains some traces of
other languages. In general, however, it is a neat writing system that has
survived since the 16th century, throughout all kinds of political
regimes, occupations and the division of the country. For this reason, despite
his colonialist background, the Vietnamese still look somewhat fondly at de
Rhodes.

There’s
Norway around spelling rules.

Why don’t we
have a look at Norwegian next? We’ll see a language whose main writing system, Bokmål
(book tongue), is essentially Danish with slight changes. Danish and Norwegian
are very closely related and can be intercomprehensible, depending on what
dialect speakers use. The language similarities and parallels in writing come
in handy today, but they stem from the long Danish domination of Norway. The
two states were seen as one country well into the 19th century. For
this reason, Bokmål still is the dominant writing system, although Nynorsk
(New Norse, ironically the older writing system), fits Norwegian pronunciation
patterns better. The further you move west (away from Denmark), the more
popular Nynorsk gets.

Both varieties
are officially recognised by the Norwegian state, taught in the same schools
and used in public to various extents. Members of the administration are
expected to reply to mail in the same variety that was used in the request and
no province is allowed to use one variety to more than 75% in official areas.
Since Danish and Swedish are also allowed in official written correspondence,
the system can appear quite chaotic. And we’re not even counting in the more
antiquated varieties Riksmål (national language) and Høgnorsk
(High Norse). These former writing standards (with Riksmål being even closer to Danish
and Høgnorsk being even further
from it) have thankfully become rare, but there are people and organisations
willing to invest a lot of time, just to keep them somewhat alive. Is that a
lot to take in? It gets even weirder when you take into account that less than
six million people speak Norwegian at all.

In the area of
writing, Norway hasn’t distanced itself from Denmark as much as Korea or
Vietnam have from China. That’s because Danish rule over Norway ended very
late, both languages were related to begin with and the relations between both
nations are friendly today. The outcome, however, is kind of problematic:
people need to be fluent in both systems and people artificially switch between
two idioms just to fulfil a legal quota. However, no one is discriminated
against based on how they write, and that’s still a nice thing.

I Afri-can’t
spell that!

No list of inefficient writing systems
could be complete without the African continent. Most African languages simply
weren’t used in writing before European colonisation. When writing systems were
created, they were based on European languages, mostly English and French. They
also weren’t made up by linguists, but usually by missionaries trying to
translate the bible (who would just work with what they were used to). Now,
English and French are both kind of inefficient in their writing, since both
preserve a spelling that is out of sync with modern pronunciation. Just think
of fish = ghoti or the French city of Bordeaux using four letters to
express one o-sound. French uses <ou> (two letters) for a simple u-sound,
and the more efficient, single letter <u> for the somewhat fancy u-Umlaut
(<ü> in German or Turkish) – a sound few languages use at all. English,
on the other hand, simply doesn’t have a long e-sound. And of course, these
inefficiencies were taken over into new languages by means of their spelling.

Using the Latin alphabet for African
languages can only work out when it is a neutral form where the pronunciation
of certain letters is not tied to their pronunciation in one specific Western
language. On top of that, additional sounds should be expressed through accents
or additional characters, rather than ever-longer combination of letters. For
this reason, the German Ethnologist Diedrich Westermann developed the Africa
Alphabet and presented it (to colonialists, not Africans) in London in
1928. The alphabet has been adjusted to the linguistic situation in (Western)
Africa several times and now has close to sixty letters. That may sound like a
lot, but since you wouldn’t need all of these in every language, learning the
alphabet wouldn’t even be such a big deal.

The real problem
is that Africans aren’t using this alphabet to the extent that linguists have
been hoping for. That’s because many native African languages are used in more
private, oral settings. And when private communication is in written form, e.g.
when people are chatting, most African languages aren’t available (e.g. as
auto-correct on cellphones or as spell-checks on a PC). The ones that are
available, like isiZulu or Somaali, don’t use the Africa Alphabet as a starting
point. And even in handwriting, few people are aware of its existence, since
most African states don’t do a lot to promote a standardized use of native
languages – there are just too many, and most governments have different
priorities. Still, the alphabet is around and offers a good starting point to
any attempt of standardisation. Although it was established through
colonisation, it can be a means of self-empowerment that makes local African
languages and cultures more independent, giving them a stable, written
foundation.

So yeah, the struggle with spelling is real, for a lot of people. Languages influence each other, and they don’t always copy each other’s most positive aspects. If we all looked at languages neutrally, leaving aside history, customs and patriotism (like former Yugoslvia did, for instance), we could probably create a couple of pretty logical writing systems and solve a huge lot of problems. But how likely is that?

Now that the
sappy part of this essay is for the most part over, apologies for my
sentimental outpourings, I would like to move on. From the rather unfortunate
circumstances that English found me in, to where we are today.

With not much
more to do through my formative years than watching Doctor Who, Sherlock and
Downtown Abbey while imitating the oh-so-charming accents I heard in these
programmes, I would accumulate a rather large vocabulary, as well as a British
accent. These days, when people hear me speak, in a classroom setting or
elsewhere, they usually assume that my accent stems from a year abroad. And I won’t
hide the fact that it does inflate my ego just a little bit every time I get to
correct them and say that I am in truth self-taught (I leave out the traumatic
abandonment part of the story most of the time; it simply doesn’t have as nice
a ring to it, and, in my experience, tends to drag the mood down quite a bit).

The first time
I did visit an English-speaking country was after secondary school. It had been
my wish to visit London for years, and so finally at the age of fifteen, I
travelled there by myself (a decision that my mother was surprisingly on board
with). There had always been something about the city that had drawn me to it,
and the night I arrived, it took no more than a single sighting of the city
lights reflecting in the pitch-black Thames water for me to completely fall in
love. I really believe that on that trip I left a piece of my soul in the night
sky over London.

Since then I’ve
visited the city three more times and still it never fails to take my breath
away. So weirdly familiar, like I had always been there, or maybe meant to be
there – it’s a sense of home that doesn’t need a domicile to feel real. All
this accompanied by the fact that not standing out as a tourist, at least in my
mind, and being able to stroll around and pretend to belong there just gives me
the greatest feeling of accomplishment.

While in
London with my mum last year, she let me handle all the talking (as well as the
navigation on the underground, one of my guilty pleasures when in the city. What
a joy it is to know which way you’re going.). She was fascinated by me chatting
with a member of staff at the Camden Market tube station, mostly, she told me
afterwards, because I kept using ‘slang’ or simply colloquial language (I
suspect she meant I had developed a bit of a habit of using the greeting ‘hiya’
ever since I had briefly visited Huddersfield the year before). The pride in my
mother’s eyes at seeing, or rather hearing, her daughter confidently
communicate in a foreign language was not only the greatest reward for my
efforts thus far, but also the best motivation to keep pushing myself to be
better and to hopefully one day complete the perfection of my English.

Having received a certain certificate from some supposedly smart people better qualified to judge my abilities than me which says, black ink on white paper, that I am already a level C2 when it comes to English, both written and spoken, also boosts my confidence that my goal is really achievable in my life time. English is a huge part of my life. From writing my first poetry in sixth grade to unironically reading Shakespeare plays today, it has given me more than could ever fit on two pages. It may be words, words, mere words to some, but for me it’s a matter from the heart.

My first
contact with English must have occurred somewhere in kindergarden. As I was only four or five at the time, my
memories are admittedly hazy. But I remember a tiny children’s book, colourful
and made of cardboard, telling all the toddlers in attendance that some people
refer to a Katze as ‘cat’. Not that
we cared much – there were sandcastles to build and a whole world to be
discovered.

Growing up in
a small village in the south of Germany with both my parents native speakers of
German, my overall contact with other languages was limited. The only open
restaurant in town was owned by a Turkish family, so I learned the word ‘merhaba’
before even being aware of the existence of ‘hello’. So it wasn’t until primary
school that I started learning English formally. At that age – I was seven in
first grade – I really had priorities other than acquiring a second language. There
were letters to learn, trees to climb and, unfortunately, basic maths to wrestle
with.

All of this was
about to change, however, at secondary. Having developed a deeply-rooted hatred
of mathematics and any sort of natural science, I was already drawn to
languages and the humanities, but for the time being, my relationship with
English still hadn’t moved past the ‘at-least-I-can-do-this-instead-of-division’
stage. But life was about to hit me, and it was about to hit me hard. And, once
again, my priorities shifted. Where before there were friends to meet and fun
to be had, there was now fear to be felt and a childhood to be lost.

I won’t go
into the details about what happened when I was twelve, as my incredibly dramatic,
sad story isn’t the subject of this piece after all. The reason I’m bringing up
this stage of the journey at all is its significance for my relationship with
English. You see, it was at this moment when change became inevitable and I was
forced to suddenly grow up and function. When the outside world became chaotic,
I, god-like, chose to create a new world, a world inside my head, a world
filled with obsessions and hyper focus, just enough to keep me sane. When I
turned down invitations until I was simply not invited any more, when I was
alone – that’s when it found me. A language that allowed me to express through
writing what I could never say out loud, a language that let me run away with
the Doctor, a language that would bring me the songs that, after hours of
exhausting translation, would bring me the messages I needed to hear to
survive. A language that opened up an online community in which I felt a little
less alone, where others felt what I was feeling and where I could once again
escape it all, at least for a little while.

Is three years after graduation too early for a
class reunion? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly was enough for me to spend
roughly 12 hours drinking and speaking to my classmates. So, let’s go ahead and
try to recap what went into planning it and the night itself.

As former
class president, I was the lucky one to be in charge of setting a date for the
class reunion and planning everything. So why did I set the date so early? Well,
it really boils down to two major points. First of all, our regular yearly
meetup, the city festival, fell flat this year, because of renovations in the
city center. I got these news around Christmas, which definitely was a bummer,
but sparked the idea to move the reunion date up by a few years. After talking
to my vice president, we agreed that it makes sense, also because of the second
reason, which is that the money we had in our bank was a lot for a student
wallet, but not so much for someone with a stable job that worked for a few
months.

So now that
we had the date fixed, how much prep work did we put into it? Not a whole lot
to be perfectly honest. Now that was not just because we were a bit lazy –
which admittedly we were – but we also didn’t think that the 3-year celebration
really warranted anything special. So, what did we do then? We booked an
evening at our favorite bar. It was the one we pretty much spent all of our
weekends at during school (yeah, there’s not that many alternatives in rural
areas).

The evening itself, though, went amazingly. As class president I had to be the first one there, but I also had the honor of setting up the tap with 1500€. It didn’t take long for the first people to arrive as the allure of free beer is just too big. Most classmates arrived with their old friends, but they actually all dispersed quite quickly and everyone started talking to everyone, which was amazing to see. Admittedly, we’ve always been a tightly knit class, but some of the classmates I saw talking to each other had barely anything to do with each other during school times. For those of you wondering how long the tap lasted: It took our class of 80 people (20+ or so were designated drivers) 5 hours to kill the tap, which was longer than I expected. But the end of the tap also ushered in the end of the night. The majority of people left within the next hour, except for a small group of maybe 10 people, myself included, that stayed until the sun dawned, before we all trotted home just as we did all those years ago.